Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday February 22, 2013 @06:23AM
from the turning-the-lights-off dept.

carmendrahl writes "Unless Congress and the White House act before March 1, the automatic across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester will kick in. And federal agencies are bracing for the fiscal impact. Federal agencies and the White House are releasing details about how these cuts will affect their operations. If the cuts take effect, expect fewer inspections to the food supply, cuts to programs that support cleanups at former nuclear plants, and plenty of researcher layoffs, among other things."

Now be intellectually honest and admit a bunch of that money increase is simply that black spending is now not removed from the books like it was in Bush' time. Once you add black spending in, the amount spent as a % of GDP has been dropping.

The analogy is interesting, but it fails in one crucial aspect. A family doesn't really own the money that they spend - their resources are necessarily limited as they do not own the source of the means of exchange (namely the money). If a family was to operate like the government does, it wouldn't last very long.

However, by definition, a government is there to regulate the means of exchange, and thus is not limited to a budget in the same sense as a family is. The government can print money for instance, or regulate its worth by modifying the exchange rate with other economies, or even mandating fixed pricing on certain goods like gasoline. The government doesn't pay bills in the same way that a family does. So the question of a budget is not applicable in the same sense as for a family.

So it might be an interesting analogy, but fails at the most crucial point - a government is responsible for the value of the currency, a family merely uses the currency of the government.